


How to Be Invisible

by Eromancery



Category: Vast Error
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-06-07
Packaged: 2019-10-29 05:58:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17802329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eromancery/pseuds/Eromancery





	1. Chapter 1

Corporate’s lights come on at 7 on the dot, cutting through the gloom of this part of the megacity like a cultist’s knife through the neck of a sacrifice. The sleep bleeds out of my eyes like the blood from the neck of a-  
Fuck, my metaphors are garbage when I wake up.

Neon advertisements blare through the thin scraps that make up my curtains, blaring bullshit about whatever the latest snake oil Sestro wants me to sell my soul for.

I eat my breakfast hot pocket cold. Can’t afford a higher electric bill, and as shitty as this place is, it’s still better than the streets. I can see puddles of water outside my window, runoff from who knows what ungodly process.  
They don’t care about how the little guy lives down here. That’s where I come in.  
I got many names, none of which will show up on corporate’s ledgers or censuses. The one I’m currently using is Agachr Philow. Yeah, it’s fake, and yeah, it sounds bad. That’s how you stay invisible. Nobody suspects that a name that bad is fake. After all, if you were gonna fake a name, wouldn’t you want it to be badass, one with enough charm to make anyone who hears it tempted for just one second to say hell with soulmates and fuck you till you bleed?  
But that’s not keeping your head down. I’ve lost too many allies-it would be lying to call them friends-who wanted pseudonyms that stood out.

But staying invisible is something you learn through trial and error. Sometimes the error is yours, and sometimes it’s not.  
Case in point, one guy I knew won the reduplication sweepstakes and got the ability to actually make himself invisible. Started doing the whole Robin Hood thing, stealing from corporate honchos and giving to the homeless.  
They had someone tail him with night vision goggles and attach a claymore to his door. When he came home? Kaboom.  
The lesson there is that no matter what skills you have, what abilities the jadebloods decided was worth pumping you full of, if corporate wants you dead, you’re dead.

But enough blabbering. I have a pickup to make.

The alleyways in this part of the stronghold are a twisted maze filled with trash, broken glass, and liquids I don’t want to know the name of. They’re a godsend for someone who doesn’t want to get caught.  
Someone like me, for instance.

Eventually, I reach The Slithering Worm. As far as bars go, I’m sure there are worse places.  
I’m also sure that those worse places only exist in the horrorcore dimension. The Worm’s the type of place you only frequent after you spend two months drinking seawater, and only because you’ve run out and want something that tastes about the same. But it keeps the lights on because you still get a buzz going from whatever aspartame-infused cocktail the owner’s decided to feed you, and because it’s the type of place where you can go without being bothered.  
It’s also the perfect place to hide a secret soda-smuggling ring. What Corporate stooge is going to bother checking out a place that’s held together by tape and prayer for illegal smuggling? And even if they did, there’s no way for them to know how to twist the top of the hat rack in the corner just right to make the secret staircase reveal itself.  
Hell, I’ve been doing it for sweeps, and it still makes me feel like Brendan Frasier in _Looney Tunes: Back in Action_ , discovering that there’s been a bunch of secret spy stuff under my nose the whole time.

I make my way down the staircase and into the chamber below the bar. It’s devoid of life, except for Mrpibb doing whatever profane alchemy he needs to make his product.  
He gives me a grunt when he hears me walk in. I’ve known Mrpibb for 2 sweeps now, and he’s never been one for words. Never even told me his last name, which I can respect. Silence can get you pretty far in this line of work.

I walk up to him, inspecting his work.  
“You almost ready?” I ask.

He nods. We’ll have this batch ready to go within the hour. Within two, we’ll meet up with our dealer and his subordinates, and another batch of Mister Pibb will be on the streets before tomorrow. I’d almost feel bad for the boys in the towers, if they weren’t charging ridiculous amounts for the only way of getting through the day some trolls have.

Mrpibb’s voice brings me out of my thoughts.  
“It’s done.”  
For all my talk of being invisible, he may be one of the stealthiest people I know. He’s already standing by the staircase, box of 24 cans in his hands. I hadn’t even heard him seal the aluminum.  
“All right, then,” I said. “Let’s go sell some illicit narcotics.”


	2. Chapter 2

As I get to the docks, the smells of brine, dead fish, and sour watermelon greet me. The last one’s not an inherently dock-y smell, but it is Fedala’s preferred flavor to smoke, and it’s not offensive enough for me to consider getting someone else to deal to, especially considering all the benefits he provides.

Fedala Daggoo’s his full name, and what little is left of his blood is violet. I’m sure his body has some sort of fluid pumping through it, and that it has a color, but I’ve never seen it.  
See, back when he was a kid, he and his lusus were real close. Of course, the ocean being what it was, his lusus was what he described as “a beast with a million eyes and a mouth where its blowhole used to be.” Real nice family unit, right? Anyway, things are going swimmingly until one day, the damn thing just loses its shit, beaches itself, and mauls the fuck out of him before escaping back into the ocean. He’s basically a skull with half a face and three quarters of a spinal column at this point. If luck is stored somewhere on the body, it must be in those parts, because at this very moment, his matesprit, who is both a brilliant roboticist and cyber-evolutionary, is visiting him. She fixes him up, and he dedicates himself to reuniting with his lusus, and putting him down. Sweet enough to bring a tear to your eye, isn’t it?

So now Fedala’s mostly metal, tough as nails, and presumed dead by Corporate, since that was simpler than explaining why he couldn’t donate some of his genes to the pool. All qualities useful in a drug runner.

And he owns a boat. That’s pretty useful if you’re trying to avoid a Corporate hitman, since they won’t risk losing the bastards to the depths unless you’re a real piece of work, which we try our best not to be.

Another lesson in being invisible: Make taking you out too much of an inconvenience to be worth it. 

But I digress. Sea travel up and down the coast is probably the easiest way to distribute the product, short of hijacking a highway convoy, and you’d have to be either crazy or stupid to try that.  
Fedala tips his head to me and Mrpibb as we approach. 

“Took you plague-ridden bastards long enough! I’m down to my last faestick!”

Each exclamation is punctuated by a blast of caramelized sugar smoke from his mouth. I can see at least ten discarded wrappers on the ground beneath him. He’s either been here a while, or he’s been chain-smoking. Or both.  
I make a big show of looking at my wristwatch.

“We’ve arrived perfectly on time. It’s not our fault you’re jumpy enough to smoke through half a pack. Something got you spooked, Daggoo?”

“You haven’t heard?”

On the rare occasions he’s scared, Fedala’s voice takes on a robotic timbre. Right now, he sounds like a vintage vocoder.

“Heard what?” I ask.

“You know the Tunnel Rats in Stronghold 14?” 

He knows I’m well aware of the Rats. I was working for them when I first met him, trying to find a mole in their ranks. He also knows that it’s a sore subject, since they turned on me when I discovered the mole was their chapter leader and removed him from his post with a few grains of lead. To be fair, I never got the chance to explain to them that he was the reason their raids on food storage facilities kept getting intercepted, so it looked like I decided to just install a few new nostrils into their boss’s face.

“Well,” he continues, “They’re dead now.”

The silence is thick enough you could scrape it off the bottom of your shoe with a knife.

“All of them?” I ask.

Fedala nods.

Mrpibb frowns at me. “Corporate?” He asks me.

“Nah,” I shake my head. “The Rats weren’t a big enough deal to just wipe them all out like that. If Corporate was going to take them down, they’d make a spectacle out of capturing them. Hamifi’s a coldblooded bitch, but she’s got enough of a soul in her that slaughtering a hundred troglodytes who just want to live off the grid wouldn’t fly.”

Fedala grinds the butt of his faestick under a metal foot.

“Aye,” he says. “Corporate typically isn’t in the business of ripping the hearts out of the bodies they dismember.”

Mrpibb mutters a prayer under his breath and spits on the ground.

That’s pretty fucking horrible, but I’m not sure what it has to do with us. My face must say as much, because Fedala explains,  
“Corporate’s locked the stronghold down airtight. Only authorized personnel are allowed to enter or exit. We can’t ship product through it to the landlocked strongholds.”

Something about that strikes me as odd, but I can’t put my finger on what.

“We can use the alternate route through 36,” I say. “You still on good terms with that transport guard?”

“Aye,” Fedala says. “But it’ll cost us. Twenty percent at the least.”

“Do it. We’re not doing this for the money.”

Mrpibb interjects, “A lot of people in 14 will be going through withdrawal. No access to their bondmates.” He shakes his head as he says it, like it pains him.

He has a point. It hurts me too, to just leave those people without any way to numb the pain. But it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to, back when I first started this business. You learn to deal. Or maybe you don’t, and I’ve just grown callous. Either way, I’m not risking my hide to get soda to Stronghold 14. I’ll be able to do a lot more good if I’m not in some Corporate prison, or dead.  
That’s what this place does to you. It grinds you down like water against a stone, until you’re a polluted fragment of what you once were.  
I put my hand on his shoulder.

“We do the best we can,” I say. “That has to be enough.”

Fedala ruins the moment.

“Are you lot done fucking around in the pity circle? The longer we stay out here the more likely it is someone sees us, and I’m not dressed for company!” 

He’s trying to hide his nervousness behind false bravado, but he’s not a very good actor. 

Whatever. If he wants to be an asshole by himself, let him. I hand him the cases of soda and leave. Mrpibb silently follows me as we disappear back into the growing dawn.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Worm is packed when we arrive. It’s the usual group of low-lives and the destitute, plus a few trolls wearing the garb of Corporate’s truck drivers. Looks like a couple of shipments must have just arrived.

News spreads like a wildfire in an oil refinery. It seems like the murders are the only thing anyone’s talking about. Typical. I doubt any of these assholes gave a rat’s ass about the Tunnel Rats when they were alive, but dead and mutilated? Now that’s a quick ticket to celebrity.

As I get my drink, I can’t help but overhear a conversation, mainly because the trolls having it are inebriated and appear to have forgotten the meaning of “volume control”.

“I just don’t fucking see why Corporate has to close an entire stronghold over the deaths of a couple of hicks,” one palooka says to his friend. A sudden spike in volume prevents me from hearing the response, but it does get me thinking. Why would Corporate lock down a stronghold over the murders of some tunnel-dwellers? It’d be easier to just write it off as mirthmaniacs or the alpocalypse and continue with business as usual. Shutting a down a stronghold is an economic self-amputation of the largest degree. 

I don’t know how long I spend puzzling over this. When my mind puts itself to a puzzle like this, everything turns into a blur. Comes with the blood, I guess. All I know is that when things settle back into place, the sun is streaming into the bar, and I’m wishing that I had ordered something a lot stronger. Because the only reason I can think of for the stronghold to be shutdown because of these murders is if Corporate is already aware of this murderer, if they’ve killed before and they wanted to trap them. And that means that they might have gotten out.

 

Shit.


	3. Chapter 3

That morning as I sleep, I dream of Laurem. But good dreams never last as long as you want them to, and I wake up from my head pounding and my door being pounded. Looks like I have visitors.

 Sunlight is streaming in through my windows, meaning that I have definitely not gotten enough sleep. That explains why I open my door to yell at whoever thinks this is a good time to be bothering me instead of taking a moment to realize that no one I’d want to visit me knows where I live.

I open my door to find three trolls waiting for me. All three are wearing suits, two pinstripe and one hazmat. Hazmat’s fist is raised to knock again, but they recover quickly and transforms the action into an offering for a handshake. I ignore it.

They take a breath, but before they can talk, they begin to cough violently. It sounds far too wet to be healthy. A mustard-yellow splatter covers the faceplate of their suit. I’m glad I didn’t take that handshake.  
“Miss Philow?” He gurgles as if nothing has just happened.  
“Are you, uh, are you alright?” I ask, gesturing vaguely towards their smeared faceplate.  
They wave it off.   
“Yeah, this is normal. I’m not sick or anything, my blood’s just caustic and my body doesn’t handle it that great.”  
As far as survival abilities go, that has to be one of the worst I’ve heard of. One has to wonder just what the fuck the jades are doing if they can pump out things like this. And people have. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve been approached by a client who wanted me to get them the secrets of the reduplication process. They’ve offered some pretty heavy loops to do it, too. Never enough to actually take the job, of course. The Jades have corporate’s bulge in a vise, and if I pissed them off there’d be a regulator knocking at my door with a shotgun blast instead of a fist.

“Anyway,” they say. “I’m Nitril Tripps. Mister Fontae wants to see you and he sent me to deliver you to him.”  
Message delivered, Nitril doubles over in another coughing fit. I let them get that out of their system as I ponder on how fucked I am.  
Kaizer Fontae is the biggest crime lord in this stronghold. He might be the biggest asshole, too. He got to where he is by blackmailing, intimidating and murdering anyone who got in his way, and he’s not above making public displays to act as a warning to anyone who might want him gone.   
And he’s just sent three trolls to bring me to him. This can’t be good.

 

 

Kaizer’s holed up in some old opera house he bought out. The exterior of the place is covered in what appears to be gold, although I don’t remember gold being so flaky and peeling in places. A once-shining Andromeda lies chained above the entrance, bare body a sacrifice to the eyes of all passersby.   
It’s tacky as fuck, in other words.   
The inside of the place isn’t much better. It feels more like a movie theater than opera house. The floors are sticky with soft drinks and who fucking knows what else, and the walls are stained and sagging, with holes in several of them. I can’t tell whether it’s from hands, feet, or heads being forced through the old wallpaper.

Nitril brings me to the double doors that lead into the main stage.  
“He should be ready for you, Miss Philow,” they cough. I can’t help but like the kid. They’re the politest mobster I’ve ever met, even if they are slowly melting. It’s admirable, really.

Kaizer sits in a throne flanked by two guards on the main stage, talking to one of his mooks when I step into the theater. He’s well dressed, in a suit that’s clearly been tailored for his gangly frame. Two horns that look thin enough to snap off if you lightly brushed against them poke up from beneath his elaborately coiffed hair.  
 He notices my entrance immediately, and the conversation immediately ceases.  
I stare at him.  
He stares at me.  
I stare at him.  
He stares at me.  
“Well,” I say. “I made it. Despite your directions.”  
The guards stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. Trolls have been skinned alive for less lip than that. Kaizer, though, takes it rather well. He bursts out laughing. When he calms down, his smile seems less entertained, and much more predatory.  
“This guy!” Kaizer brags to two of the trolls that flank him. “This guy! He once-“  
“She,” I interrupt. “It’s she now.”  
“I’m sorry,” he sneers. “It was he at the time and I just got so caught up in the memory.”  
His tone’s as saccharine as soda sludge. It makes me want to vomit.  
“And it was she the two times before that. It’s fluid, Fontae. Like them.”   
I punctuate my sentence by pointing to Nitril.  
Kaizer dismisses me with a wave of his hand. “As I was saying, she once tracked down a guy for me who, it turns out, was hiding on the black fucking moon of all places! Anyway, she brings him tied up to me a wice after I sent her out! My guys had been looking for five times that and got nothing, and she gets him in a wice!”  
Just like when he approached me for that job, Kaizer doesn’t actually say what he wanted that troll for. As a “reward” for my work, I got a front row seat to Kaizer dunking him in a vat of seawater, mouth and nose hooked up to a breathing apparatus so he wouldn’t get any in him. I also got to watch the water enter the bullet hole in his forehead when he tried to climb out.  
Working for Kaizer makes me feel filthy, but he’s not a troll easily refused.  
“What do you want, Fontae?” I ask.  
“Straight to business, huh? I can respect that,” he says, as if he’s ever respected anything other than himself a day in his worthless existence.   
He leans forward.  
“Some friends of mine are… concerned about the recent killings. And since they know I’ve established some sort of rapport with you, they figured I could ask you to look into it.”  
“People are killed all the time. What’s so special about these?” I ask, confused. I may hate Fontae, but he’s not a stupid man. He wouldn’t bring me in for any random killers.

“My friends are worried that the killer might be associated with The Union.”  
He’s got to be kidding me. The Union’s an urban legend, a story anti-Corporate trolls tell each other to sleep better at day.              
“You need better friends,” I say. “Ones that don’t believe in bogeymen. There’s no shadowy group of trolls going around killing people to fuck over Corporate.  If there ever was, they’d have been regulated by now. You really think Corporate would tolerate a threat like that existing?”

Kaizer shrugs.   
“It doesn’t matter what I think. My friends are very persuasive. Or was it rich? Yes, now that I think about it, my friends are very rich, and they’re paying me to get you on the job.”  
“And just what do they expect me to do? Last I checked, Stronghold 14 was on lockdown. I can’t exactly get in and start sleuthing.”  
“My friends think that the killer escaped, and this stronghold is the closest one. All you have to do is wait and see if any more bodies show up.  If they don’t, or if they do in another stronghold, then you’re fine. But if they’re in this stronghold, or nearby, I want you to inspect the body, find the killer, and figure out if it’s The Union. A simple job for an investigator with you skills, wouldn’t you say?”  
Kaizer finishes his pitch and smiles at me.   
“So what do you say?” He asks.

I get the feeling that I don’t actually have much of a choice here. It’s probably from the fact that every single one of Kaizer’s goons is aiming their weapons at me, waiting for my response.

“Fine,” I say. “But I want thirty percent of what your friends pay you.”

“It’s a deal!” Kaizer says. As I leave, he cheerfully yells from behind me, “And if you fail, I’ll have you and everyone you associate with killed!”  
It’s the same thing he said the last three times he hired me for something.

 

 

 

“So let me get this straight,” Fedala says. “The bastard hired you to find and stop some nutjob because he thinks it might be the fucking Union? Is he a crime lord or a child tellin’ ghost stories?”  
“That’s the gist of it, yeah,” I say, desperately trying to signal to the bartender that my mug is empty, and my wallet isn’t. Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to be noticing, so I’m being forced to suffer through this conversation sober. “Although he made sure to specify that it was whoever’s funding him who thought it was the Union. I think taking money from fools is pretty standard mob boss fair?”  
“Whoever’s idea it is, it be fucking ridiculous. Why would the Union take out the Tunnel Rats anyway? They were about as anti-corporate as you can get!” Fedala emphasizes this by slamming a metal fist into-and through- the table.  
“I’m not paying for that,” I say.  
“Where’s Mrpibb? Have you talked to him about this at all?” Fedala asks.  
Instead of pointing out that talking with Mrpibb is usually like talking to a drug-dispensing wall, I resort to a simple, “He’s working.”  
“Aye, well considering his life is being threatened,  I figure you might want to tell him. It’s what people with normal emotions like to call considerate.”  
“Oh,” I say. “And since when does our tin man have a heart?”  
“Haldan’s been on my case about it. Says she gave this body the capacity to feel, and that I might as well use it.”

And so our conversation shifts from bogeyman and mob bosses to the lovely and reclusive Haldan Bernal, relationship problems, and the inability to get a fucking drink. Eventually, I manage to forget about my meeting with Kaizer Fontae entirely.  
That is, at least, until the next evening, when they discover the body in the cornfield.


	4. Interlude 1

The rabbit runs through the cornfield, leaving a trail of blood and toppled ears in its wake. His stalker follows among the stalks, slowly and surely, a promise delivered and about to be kept. Wind hums through the labyrinth of maize, creating a sound that is, to his ears, not dissimilar from the static on a broken radio.

He stops for a moment, kneels down. Carefully, he unwraps the bandages that bind his face, freeing the ruined flesh beneath. He dips his finger into the trail of blood beneath his knees and brings the clay-tinged digit to his mouth.

The sweet-salty taste of blood soaked with adrenaline makes him shudder in ecstasy for a brief moment. This is what he lives for. The taste that tells him he is making a difference in someone’s life, burning a hole in the weave of fate that will never be repaired. The taste of doing something that _matters_.   
Licking the twisted mess where his lips used to be, he re-wraps his bandages.  
He cannot wait to taste the rest of the rabbit.

He sets off again at an increased pace, trotting at a surprising speed, given the weight of the chainsaw strapped to his back.

The wind buffets him, whispering secrets and promises to him as he runs towards his prey. It tears at his face, and his eyes reflexively water, even under his thick goggles. His ivory hair flies behind him, a comet’s trail against the darkness of the night sky.

He thinks back to a night not too long ago, where he took to the tunnels beneath a stronghold and carved up the gophers living in it. He took their hearts and nothing else, a choice he soon regretted. The tough muscle was hard to chew through, even with his filed teeth, and not nearly as flavorful as he had hoped it would be. Still, he can appreciate the theatrical element of the act, and the effect it had on corporate was worth the disappointing meal. He wonders if the order to shut down the place came from the great big tortoise himself, that aging fool locked up in his ivory-plated tower. Now that would have been something! To attract the attention of the CEO of this entire planet! But he knows such happenings are unlikely. Probably just some overworked pencil-pushing drone who decided it was a good idea to try and trap him before he could escape and visit the next pen to devour its juicy flock.

He is so caught up in his thoughts, he nearly trips over the rabbit when he reaches it.   
The rabbit lies limply among the stalks, their ears deaf to his bleats of pain. The gash on his leg has finally dropped him.

The rabbit looks up at his imposing figure, the shadow he casts blocking out any light the moons might have had to offer.  
“W…why?” the rabbit asks piteously, his lifeblood leaking out into the parched dirt.  
The wind is roaring now, a true tempest, the voices in the corn rising to a static-filled screech, and when he speaks the rabbit can not tell if it is simply the voice of his hunter that he hears, or the voice of something much larger using both the corn and the harvester as conduits:  
“I. Am. The. Naught-Father. And. I. Am. Here. To. Do. The. Naught-Father’s. Work.”  
He brings down the chainsaw and begins carving his morning meal.


End file.
